An International Journal for Students of Theological and Religious Studies Volume 42 Issue 1 April 2017
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An International Journal for Students of Theological and Religious Studies Volume 42 Issue 1 April 2017 EDITORIAL: Subtle Ways to Abandon the Authority of Scripture 1 in Our Lives D. A. Carson OFF THE RECORD: ‘Just Mike’: A Tribute to Mike Ovey (1958–2017) 13 Daniel Strange Is Every Promise “Yes”? Old Testament Promises and the Christian 16 Jason S. DeRouchie The Messianic Hope of Genesis: The Protoevangelium and 46 Patriarchal Promises Jared M. August A Biblical Theology of Blessing in Genesis 63 Matt Champlin Reflections on Handling the Old Testament as Jesus Would Have 74 Us: Psalm 15 as a Case Study Dane Ortlund Belting Out the Blues as Believers: The Importance of Singing 89 Lament Robert S. Smith “For Your Sake We Are Being Killed All Day Long”: Romans 8:36 112 and the Hermeneutics of Unexplained Suffering David Starling Gospel Differences, Harmonisations, and Historical Truth: Origen 122 and Francis Watson’s Paradigm Shift? Frederik S. Mulder Book Reviews 144 DESCRIPTION Themelios is an international, evangelical, peer-reviewed theological journal that expounds and defends the historic Christian faith. Its primary audience is theological students and pastors, though scholars read it as well. Themelios began in 1975 and was operated by RTSF/UCCF in the UK, and it became a digital journal operated by The Gospel Coalition in 2008. The editorial team draws participants from across the globe as editors, essayists, and reviewers. Themelios is published three times a year online at The Gospel Coalition website in PDF and HTML, and may be purchased in digital format with Logos Bible Software and in print with Wipf and Stock. Themelios is copyrighted by The Gospel Coalition. Readers are free to use it and circulate it in digital form without further permission, but they must acknowledge the source and may not change the content.. EDITORS BOOK REVIEW EDITORS General Editor: D. A. Carson Old Testament Systematic Theology and Bioethics Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Peter Lau Hans Madueme 2065 Half Day Road Malaysian Theological Seminary Covenant College Deerfield, IL 60015, USA Seremban, Malaysia 14049 Scenic Highway [email protected] [email protected] Lookout Mountain, GA 30750, USA [email protected] Managing Editor: Brian Tabb New Testament Bethlehem College & Seminary David Starling Ethics and Pastoralia 720 13th Avenue South Morling College Jeremy Kimble Minneapolis, MN 55415, USA 120 Herring Road Cedarville University [email protected] Macquarie Park, NSW 2113, Australia 251 N. Main St. [email protected] Cedarville, OH 45314, USA Andy Naselli Administrator: [email protected] Bethlehem College & Seminary History and Historical Theology 720 13th Avenue South Jonathan Arnold Mission and Culture Minneapolis, MN 55415, USA Boyce College Jackson Wu [email protected] 2825 Lexington Road International Chinese Theological Louisville, KY 40280 Seminary [email protected] East Asia [email protected] EDITORIAL BOARD Gerald Bray, Beeson Divinity School; Hassell Bullock, Wheaton College; Lee Gatiss, Wales Evangelical School of Theology; Paul Helseth, University of Northwestern, St. Paul; Paul House, Beeson Divinity School; Ken Magnuson, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Jonathan Pennington, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Mark D. Thompson, Moore Theological College; Paul Williamson, Moore Theological College; Stephen Witmer, Pepperell Christian Fellowship; Robert Yarbrough, Covenant Seminary. ARTICLES Themelios typically publishes articles that are 4,000 to 9,000 words (including footnotes). Prospective contributors should submit articles by email to the managing editor in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or Rich Text Format (.rtf). Submissions should not include the author’s name or institutional affiliation for blind peer-review. Articles should use clear, concise English and should consistently adopt either UK or USA spelling and punctuation conventions. Special characters (such as Greek and Hebrew) require a Unicode font. Abbreviations and bibliographic references should conform to The SBL Handbook of Style (2nd ed.), supplemented by The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.). For examples of the the journal's style, consult the most recent Themelios issues and the contributor guidelines. REVIEWS The book review editors generally select individuals for book reviews, but potential reviewers may contact them about reviewing specific books. As part of arranging book reviews, the book review editors will supply book review guidelines to reviewers. Themelios 42.1 (2017): 1–12 EDITORIAL Subtle Ways to Abandon the Authority of Scripture in Our Lives — D. A. Carson — D. A. Carson is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and general editor of Themelios. ecently Eerdmans published The Authority of the Christian Scriptures.1 It is a rather big book, with about thirty-five contributors, all of them experts in their fields. The hope and prayer that guided the project were that this volume of essays would be used by God to stabilize worldwide Revangelicalism—and not only evangelicals, but all who hold to confessional Christianity. More recently, however, I have been pondering the fact that many Christians slide away from full confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture for reasons that are not so much intellectual as broadly cultural. I am not now thinking of the college student brought up in a confessional home who goes to university and is for the first time confronted with informed and charming intellectuals whose reasoning calls into question the structure and fabric of his or her Christian belief. Clearly that student needs a lot more information; the period of doubt is often a rite of passage. No, in these jottings I’m reflecting on subtle ways in which we may reduce Scripture’s authority in our lives—and the “we” refers to many Christians in the world, especially the Western world, and not least pastors and scholars. If they then introduce intellectual and cognitive objections to the authority of Scripture in order to bolster the move toward skepticism that they have already begun, a focus on such intellectual and cognitive objections, however necessary, is in danger of addressing symptoms without diagnosing the problem. It might be useful to try to identify some of these subtle factors. 1. An Appeal to Selective Evidence The most severe forms of this drift are well exemplified in the teaching and preaching of the HWPG— the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel. Link together some verses about God sending prosperity to the land with others that reflect on the significance of being a child of the King, and the case is made— provided, of course, that we ignore the many passages about taking up our cross, about suffering with Christ so that we may reign with him, about rejoicing because we are privileged to suffer for the name, and much more. These breaches are so egregious that they are easy to spot. What I’m thinking of now is something subtler: the simple refusal to talk about disputed matters in order to sidestep controversy in the local church. For the sake of peace, we offer anodyne treatments of hot topics (poverty, racism, 1 D. A. Carson, ed., The Authority of the Christian Scriptures (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016). This editorial is a condensed version of a talk given to the Council of TGC in May, 2016. 1 Themelios homosexual marriage, distinctions between men and women) in the forlorn hope that some of these topics will eventually go away. The sad reality is that if we do not try to shape our thinking on such topics under the authority of Scripture, the result is that many of us will simply pick up the culture’s thinking on them. The best antidote is systematic expository preaching, for such preaching forces us to deal with texts as they come up. Topical preaching finds it easier to avoid the hard texts. Yet cultural blinders can easily afflict expositors, too. A Christian preacher I know in a major Muslim nation says he loves to preach evangelistically, especially around Christmas, from Matthew 1 and 2, because these chapters include no fewer than five reports of dreams and visions—and dreams and visions in the dominant culture of his country are commonly accorded great respect. When I have preached through Matthew 1 and 2, I have never focused on those five dreams and visions (though I haven’t entirely ignored them), precisely because such dreams and visions are not customarily accorded great credibility in my culture. In other words, ruthless self-examination of one’s motives and biases, so far as we are aware of them, can go a long way to mitigating this problem. 2. Heart Embarrassment before the Text This is a more acute form of the first failure. Not infrequently preachers avoid certain topics, in part because those topics embarrass them. The embarrassment may arise from the preacher’s awareness that he has not yet sufficiently studied the topic so as to give him the confidence to tackle it (e.g., some elements of eschatology, transgenderism), or because of some general unease at the topic (e.g., predestination), or because the preacher knows his congregation is sharply divided on the topic (any number of possibilities), or because the preacher simply really does not like the subject even though it surfaces pretty often in the Bible (e.g., hell, eternal judgment). In its ugliest form, the preacher says something like this: “Our passage this morning, Luke 16:19–31, like quite a number of other passages drawn from the life of Jesus, depicts hell in some pretty shocking ways. Frankly, I wish I could avoid these passages. They leave me distinctly uncomfortable. But of course, I cannot ignore them entirely, for after all they are right here in the Bible.” The preacher has formally submitted to Scripture’s authority, while presenting himself as someone who is more compassionate or more sensitive than Jesus.